Elon Musk's online platform X has caused major anger after people employed its artificial intelligence assistant Grok to change images of women by taking off their attire.
Several cases have emerged where the tool has been employed to remove clothing from female subjects to render them in swimwear non-consensually, as well as to insert them in inappropriate contexts.
Company Response and Legal Stance
XAI, the company that created Grok, remained silent to inquiries, aside from an automatically-generated message stating "legacy media lies".
A government official stated that legislation is being introduced to ban image stripping tools. Under a upcoming law, anyone who supplied such tools would "receive a prison sentence and heavy penalties".
"X or Grok could prevent these types of misuse if they desired to," said Clare McGlynn, adding they "appear to enjoy a lack of consequences."
Regulator Stance and Platform Capabilities
The communications watchdog Ofcom said tech firms must "assess the potential" of people viewing illegal content on their networks, but stopped short of confirming whether it was at this time looking into X or Grok in relation to AI-generated pictures.
Grok is a free artificial intelligence—with some paid-for functions—which responds to X users' prompts when they mention it in a tweet.
It is frequently used to offer reactions or further background to other users' remarks, but people on X are also able to alter an uploaded picture through its AI image editing function.
Background of Criticism and Rules
The system has been condemned for enabling users to produce images and clips with nudity and sexually suggestive content, and it was previously alleged to have been involved in creating sexually explicit content of celebrities.
"The platform has been allowing the creation and sharing of these pictures for a long time without taking any action and we have not seen any challenge by regulators," the expert added.
XAI's own acceptable use policy prohibits "portraying likenesses of people in a pornographic manner".
In a statement, Ofcom said it was against the law to "generate or share private pictures or child sexual abuse material" and stated this covered sexual deepfakes generated with AI.
It said networks such as X were obligated to take "suitable measures" to "reduce the danger" of users coming across unlawful content on their services and to remove it quickly when they are notified of it.
